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RobbBB comments on Making Rationality General-Interest - Less Wrong
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I agree that's an interesting and important question. If we're looking for vaguely applicable academic terms for what's being taught, 'philosophy, mathematics and science' is a better fit than 'logic and science', since it's not completely obvious to me that traditional logic is very important to what we want to teach to the general public. A lot of the stuff it's being proposed we teach is still poorly understood, and a lot of the well-understood stuff was not well-understood a hundred years ago, or even 50 years ago, or even 25 years ago. So history is a weak guide here; Enlightenment reformers shared a lot of our ideals but very little of our content.
I don't agree. You want to teach philosophy as rationality? There are a great deal of different philosophies, which one will you teach? Or you'll teach history of philosophy? Or meta-philosophy (which very quickly becomes yet-another-philosophy-in-the-long-list-of-those-which-tried-to-be-meta)?
And I really don't see what math has to do with this at all. If anything, statistics is going to be more useful than math because statistics is basically a toolbox for dealing with uncertainty and that's the really important part.
Philosophy includes epistemology, which is kind of important to epistemic ratioanlity.
Philosophy is a toolbox as well as a set of doctrines.
Various philosophies include different approaches to epistemology. Which one do you want to teach?
I agree that philosophy can be a toolbox, but so can pretty much any field of human study -- from physics to literary criticism. And here we're talking about teaching rationality, not about the virtues of a comprehensive education.